FX Awards – A Stoat’s Eye View

Now all the hullabaloo has died down again for another year, it’s time to look at the entries and see what really made its mark design-wise as assessed by our regular but independent contributor, Aidan Walker

Well, it isn’t bird’s eye, is it, because I’m not accurately surveying detail from a great height, but I thought I’d cast my eye over the finalists for the FX Awards and give my everso-humble opinion...

The FX Awards are one of my favorite subjects, and I’d like to look at them from the point of view of design, as not a huge amount of text explaining the design is ever available to the ordinary reader.

The judges, of course, pore over it minutely for hours on end and read all the written submissions. And I am in the almost equally privileged position of being able to read the blurbs at leisure and decide what I want to talk about, and that’s it.

First thing that caught my eye is the ‘Product of the Year’ category.What do judges look for? Sleek (or at least appropriate) looks, uncompromised functionality, solid eco credential and, above all, The Big Idea. The single, overriding, conceptual coup de grace that makes it certain that this is indeed a product that should exist.

Let’s face it, a lot of them shouldn’t. Especially in this eco-terrorised day and age, when radical and provocative design thinkers are beginning to ask exceptionally awkward questions such as: ‘Do we need this? Do we need it to be designed? Do, in fact, we need design and designers at all?’

Let this idea that the best design is no design at all take hold, and we’ll all be out of a job (see previous columns for what I and many others think designers should be doing with their time. Let’s hope it’s not enforced spare time).

Clearly, in the Product of the Year category, two designs stand out with Big Idea written all over them – Roca’sW+W combined toilet and hand basin, and Interface’s TacTile floor tile non-liquid adhesive patches.

Both products answer a specific need, and do it with an elegance that comes from the satisfyingly appropriate application of design intelligence to the problem.W+Wis very reminiscent of Robin Levien’s Space range of sanitaryware for Ideal Standard, a comprehensive and hugely successful attack on the discomfort and inconvenience of all those tiny British bathrooms in houses originally designed without them. It’s a no brainer isn’t it? Save space, save water; what more could you want?

Similarly, Interface’s TacTile comes from a manufacturer heavily committed to sustainability in everything that it does – what other company do you know that has promised to eliminate ‘any negative impact the company may have on the environment’ by 2020?

These connectors are made from eminently recyclable PET, but their real charm is the elimination of those nasty liquid tile adhesives, and of course they make installation easier and quicker, with no drying time too. Benefit all rounds. Another double or triple whammy, the kind of thing that makes you think they must be right.

The rest of the fields in this category raise an eyebrow. Personally I’ve never seen the attraction in the Bouroullecs’ Vegetal chair for Vitra. If, as the blurb says, the contours ‘seem borrowed from nature’, why not just go the whole hog with your biomimicry, Ronan and Erwan?

This just looks like stopping way short of the mark to me. The material – glassfibre reinforced polyamide – can be recycled, but they aren’t making a song and dance about it.

Neither Bisley’s Bite, Montis’s Lazy Bastard or Stefan Diez’s Houdini chair for E15 pass the ‘Yes, but do we really need it? ‘ test. You could argue that Bisley’s clever little mobile storage unit fulfils a need in the best possible way, but there are other such items out there, so the only way Bisley has to distinguish it is to give it a little sort of top storey that also helps to mark out your territory on your cheap shared bench-desk. Or Dench.

Houdini is nicely crafted, sweetly engineered, but hell, it’s just another chair. Lazy Bastard – well, yes, comfy, and it is kind of a biggish idea to put a beanbag on a frame. But not that big.

As for the Village chandeliers for Westfield by Replica, even if they do only use 844 one-watt LEDs plus ambient light – which is after all a big energy-efficient plus, and all power to the designers – surely this sort of extravagant manufacturing should be way past and gone?

PerhapsWestfield should never have been built anyway, because an extravagant temple to the fading gods of retail consumption also needs its equally extravagant fittings and fixtures. And this one steps up to the mark; quarter of a million components, 3,000 strands, 11,000m of wire, new production techniques – the lot. Should this one really exist? Your choice.

This article was first published in FX Magazine.








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